Abstract: Physicians, Nurses and Protestant Missions in Brazil (1870-1920) Profª Drª Eliane Moura da Silva – History Departament –State University of Campinas –SP/Brazil elmoura@unicamp.br The Protestant missionaries which arrived in Brazil in the end of the 19 th century faced specific historical situations such as Catholicism and Slavery. Brazil was an independent Empire and the Catholic Church its official religion. However, medical care was within their first missionary strategies. Among the Protestant missionaries who developed the medical practice as strategy, this study detaches the work of the Congregational Scottish physician Doctor Robert Reid Kalley (1809-1888), American physician Doctor James McFadden Gaston (Presbytery, 1824-1903) and Methodist Jeanne Marie Rennotte (1852-1942), responsible for the organization of Red Cross in Brazil and the Nursing course at School of Medicine and Surgery in Rio de Janeiro in 1917. Key words: Healing – Protestant Missions – Brazil XIX- XX centuries. The Protestant missionary movements of modern history since the late eighteenth century integrate this period along with the Enlightenment and the changing economic, social and cultural capitalism, industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism. From the second half of the nineteenth century, some actors of these stories, both men and women, were beginning to suggest that it was necessary to redeem, improve and enhance other cultures according to the standards of the Western Christian civilization. It was in this context that new Christian missionary movements in general, and the Protestant movement in particular, assumed the basic purpose of introducing a Western Christian way of life based on effort, abstinence, self- discipline, and religious conversion. 1 We sought to develop a perspective that considered the central challenges of cultural history: to connect the discursive construction of the social reality and the social construction of discourse in the specificity of historical understanding. Michel de Certeau 2 formulated what would become the fundamental tension of historical knowledge: a discourse capable of triggering constructions, representations, narratives, compositions, and figures to construct a body of utterances that could establish sets of rules to monitor, albeit on a provisional basis, the production operations of certain subjects. A cultural history of religions should also be reflected upon. After all, what is religion, and of which religion are we talking about? An epistemological feature of the history of religions is the cultural perspective and the concern to define the concept of religion as an interpretative and conceptual category. While religion can be analyzed from different perspectives, culture is a specific and limiting object of the historian himself, religion being a privileged factor to qualify culture with its own values. “Religion” must be defined within its historical and cultural context, within its system of values. 3 Only in the West can we find a culture that invents itself in terms of civilization and religion, building its own history and the world’s as a ongoing 1 Dana L. Robert, American women in mission. A social history of their thought and practice (Macom 1998). Nial Ferguson, Empire: the rise and the demise of the British world order and the lessons for global powers (New York 2002). 2 Michel Certeau, A escrita da História (Rio de Janeiro 1982). 3 Eliane Moura Silva/Karina K. Bellotti/Leonildo S. Campos, Religião e sociedade na América Latina (São Bernardo do Campo 2010).